Ok. Hyperbole. A bit. Not really 3000 in the list but if you expand the classes into individual things I think I'd have a pretty high number.
I've been following some frugal youtubers. The recipes are usually useful because they are like mine: Take what you have, apply heat, eat.
The youtube then posts a list down the side of the screen of other stuff I might enjoy. The list is usually wrong. I noticed that many many of these are videos you have to watch to putatively find out what X number of things the person or family (all well staged in full make up and often wearing yoga pants) doesn't buy. You might find out, admittedly I only watched a couple to get the flavor of it, that this person/family gave up buying a brand new Mercedes each year, no longer orders from the most expensive restaurant in town more than once a week, etc. The real goal seems to be to build views and clicks and ad doses so the youtuber gets paid. I moved on. The youtubers I like for the frugal tips are the ones who clearly are filming on an outdated phone, no make up, and wearing the same outfit in pretty much every vid.
So, I gave up the new car yearly before I even started. My "don't buys" are a tad more advanced and rest assured if you read this, I make no $$.
Most my "things" are whole classes of things. Many of the blogger/vlogger types have "things" that are actually subsets of things...like they don't buy top end shampoo anymore. One who is running in the background is saying they gave up "expensive make up"...ok. What if you just looked like what you look like?
Some things I have quit buying or never bought/paid for:
1) Make up. Once I bought mascara but it was green and blue and specifically to bug a creepo professor I was working for.
2) Hair products. A bit of Sun-In in the 1980s, shampoo and conditioner until I went no-poo. The occasional deep conditioner (turns out it was just olive oil). In the last 2 years I have spent 5$ on specific hair products. An expired box of henna. Still baking soda or salt to wash the hair, and vinegar-water to rinse, then a cold rinse. A year ago I got a fantastic hair brush and comb so not even those.
3) Car washes. In my life I have never washed a car that I own. I trash them before they rust. And, I don't care how my car looks.
4) New cars. Never bought a new car. Don't plan on it. Used cars and I'm shifting back to more used. The 3 year old car was hard to get the money out of.
5) i-anything. I have never spent money on an apple product. I have one. It's a gift (thanks pam!) of someone's used old one to replace another hand-me-down version of an outdated i-product.
6) Anything from Amazon. ONCE in 2020 I got a thing on Amazon because it couldn't be had from any other source in the timeframe I needed it to keep working. I blame covid.
7) Cheese. OK, dairy. I can't eat it hence I don't buy it.
8) Booze. I don't drink much so why buy it. I remember buying prosecco in Italy a decade or more ago. I might have treated to some booze in Portland a year ago...then again, might have been Unca Pat who sprung for the Brennevin.
9) Earrings for myself...because I do not have pierced ears.
10) Haircuts. As covered in other posts, not even a trim since 1989.
11) Manicures/pedicures. I don't even get why people spend money on odd looking fingernails. Whatever.
12) Tattoos. Don't have one. Don't want one.
13) Piercings. Why? Why spend money to have a hole punched in your body that you now want to buy jewelry to fill the hole back up? Those who want to pierce, help yourselves. You probably wonder why I want to spend money on thrift store coffee makers.
14) Purses. I don't carry them so I don't buy them. I do have ONE that I carry on vacations because it fits a bottle of water and is the "personal item" I can take on an airplane in addition to the carry-on. I got it in San Gemignano (spelling????) Italy more than a decade ago.
15) Sox. This one I might have to start again some day but I get enough REALLY NICE sox on the holidays (3 pair or more this year...all fabulous) that I haven't needed to.
16) Dish clothes/sponges. I have a friend who knits amazing dish clothes and have a few in back stock, 3 in rotation. An Aunt (Hi Marcie) sends me re-usable cellulose ones for holidays pretty often too. I also find that the pockets off worn out jeans make a really good dish rag for things like cast iron pots. Given that I buy thrift jeans and wear them out about 3 pairs a year, that's 6 dish clothes I'm producing...I should have a sustainable system going. Yes, I wash the worn out pants before I repurpose them.
17) Paper towels. I have dish towels and a rag bag. AND I'm not above taking the end of the roll after the custodian at work refills the fancy (stupid?) automatic electric paper towel dispenser that seems to be unable to cope with the last 1/2inch of the roll. That's a lot of paper towel to chuck in the trash. That said, I have bought shop towels in 2020 so maybe I'm lying. People were helping me with plumbing and they like shop towels to use. So I got some. Used up the remainder as TP during the mid 'rona times.
18) Anything at Walmart. Haven't been there since the floods in Iowa and that was about the only store in town with what we needed. Before that I hadn't been in a Walmart in years. It always surprises me to see cars in the parking lot as I head to Goodwill next door in Moscow. Much like Bezos, the Waltons do not need my money.
19) Cable/dish/etc. I don't have a TV. Until the 'rona hit I didn't pay for wifi either and when it's over I plan to cancel it. It's 20$/month for the wifi hotspot.
20) Streaming service. No hulu, netflix, whatever.
21) Gym membership. I get one free at work and another one with the Dr I use. So I have access to 2 gyms, but only one with showers.
22) Bottled water. This one I have the occasional mishap with. Once in a while I am somewhere and have forgotten my tap water in a bottle or jug and can't find free potable water. I then buy a bottle of water in a really good quality bottle if I can so I can re-use the bottle. I hate it though.
23) Subscriptions. No magazines, no food boxes, no make up boxes, no scarf/purse/etc. I can't even conceive of how some of these are subscriptions. No automatic re-order or re-ship things. Since I buy less online than most of the other people I know, that helps.
24) Autopay anything. I don't autopay ANYTHING because it's complicated to get it stopped. And it would make me ignore the bill. I have auto-notices for the phone and storage, but I pay them individually and review all bills before I pay them almost every time. Twice in 2020 I paid the phone bill late so I put a reminder on my work calendar.
25) Cleaning products. I make what I need from vinegar, baking soda, borax, etc. During early 'rona I bought a thing of bleach in case I had to drink my well water during a 2 week quarantine when I hadn't been running much water through the storage tank. It can get a bit funky...and not in a good "Jame Brown" kind of way. The bleach is sitting unopened on the porch. I may use it in laundry eventually.
26) Keurig pods. I don't have a keurig or any similar coffee maker. There is one at work. I have a little adapter and fill that with whatever coffee is at hand. The little pods are expensive compared to even nice beans you grind up yourself AND they are creating a layer at the dumps that will rival the layer of disposable diapers (I'm not just blaming babies for that...duffer diapers are a huge industry too).
27) Audio equipment. Because I have a bad ear for music. No point in my buying fancy headphones or speakers. I have a 3 little radios, one was a gift and 2 were thrift, so I can check the news or weather or listen to something. They are mono-speaker deals with crank things to charge them up. One is solar. OH! Wait. 3 years ago I bought 2$ speakers at thrift because the speakers on my computer died. I don't think they count as "audio equipment". Work bought me headphones so I can do zoom meetings more efficiently. I often forget I have them.
28) Furniture. The world is FULL of free furniture especially if you had my Gramma. I bought a little shelving unit in the late 1990s when I lived in a house with a strange kitchen. No drawers! And the cupboards were narrower than a dinner plate. So I got some folding shelves to put my plates on and to hold cans to stand the silverware in.
29) Electricity! I have a wee solar system at the wee shed so that's paid off. I will need to maintain the system through the years but no monthly electric bill. Same with the water...put the well and pump and etc in so no monthly bill. Something blew up last night or snapped. Could have been a battery...which would SUCK or it could have been a frozen tree (cold and windy last night) snapping off. Or a transformer on the electric line on the highway blowing up. If it was one of my batteries I will need to replace that. I think 1 or more need replaced anyway. But maybe not when it's 10 degrees out.
And much much more!
NOT buying stuff is thrifty, frugal and helps with voluntary simplicity. If I don't buy it, I don't have to deal with it.
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